Black House

can wall that noise off if he has to, keep it from spreading and blanketing his entire thought process with static, but it’s still damned unpleasant. Dale has given him one of the Ruger .357s that are the police department’s service weapons; it’s now stuck in the waistband of his blue jeans. He was surprised at how good the weight of it felt in his hand, almost like a homecoming. Guns may not be of much use in the world behind Black House, but they have to get there first, don’t they? And according to Beezer and Doc, the approach is not exactly undefended.

“Dale, do you have a pocketknife?”

“Glove compartment,” Dale says. He glances at the long package on Jack’s lap. “I presume you want to open that.”

“You presume right.”

“Can you explain a few things while you do it? Like whether or not, once we get inside Black House, we can expect Charles Burnside to jump out of a secret door with an axe and start—”

“Chummy Burnside’s days of jumping out at folks are all over,” Jack says. “He’s dead. Ty Marshall killed him. That’s what hit us outside the Sand Bar.”

The chief’s car swerves so extravagantly—all the way across to the left side of the road—that Beezer looks back for a moment, startled at what he’s just seen in his rearview. Jack gives him a hard, quick wave —Go on, don’t worry about us—and Beez faces forward again.

“What?” Dale gasps.

“The old bastard was hurt, but I have an idea that Ty still did one hell of a brave thing. Brave and crafty both.” Jack is thinking that Henry softened Burnside up and Ty finished him up. What George Rathbun would undoubtedly have called a honey of a double play.

“How—”

“Disemboweled him. With his bare hands. Hand. I’m pretty sure the other one’s chained up somehow.”

Dale is silent for a moment, watching the motorcyclists ahead of him as they lean into a curve with their hair streaming out from beneath their token gestures at obeying Wisconsin’s helmet law. Jack, meanwhile, is slitting open brown wrapping paper and revealing a long white carton beneath. Something rolls back and forth inside.

“You’re telling me that a ten-year-old boy disemboweled a serial killer. A serial cannibal. You somehow know this.”

“Yes.”

“I find that extremely difficult to believe.”

“Based on the father, I guess I can understand that. Fred’s . . .” A wimp is what comes to mind, but that is both unfair and untrue. “Fred’s tenderhearted,” Jack says. “Judy, though . . .”

“Backbone,” Dale says. “She does have that, I’m told.”

Jack gives his friend a humorless grin. He’s got the buzzing confined to a small portion of his brain, but in that one small portion it’s shrieking like a fire alarm. They’re almost there. “She certainly does,” he tells Dale. “And so does the boy. He’s . . . brave.” What Jack has almost said is He’s a prince.

“And he’s alive.”

“Yes.”

“Chained in a shed somewhere.”

“Right.”

“Behind Burnside’s house.”

“Uh-huh.”

“If I’ve got the geography right, that places him somewhere in the woods near Schubert and Gale.”

Jack smiles and says nothing.

“All right,” Dale says heavily. “What have I got wrong?”

“It doesn’t matter. Which is good, because it’s impossible to explain.” Jack just hopes Dale’s mind is screwed down tightly, because it’s apt to take one hell of a pounding in the next hour or so.

His fingernail slits the tape holding the box closed. He opens it. There’s bubble wrap beneath. Jack pulls it out, tosses it into the footwell, and looks at Ty Marshall’s Brewer Bash prize—a prize he won even though he apparently never entered the contest.

Jack lets out a little sigh of awe. There’s enough kid left in him to react to the object that he sees, even though he never played the game once he was too old for Little League. Because there’s something about a bat, isn’t there? Something that speaks to our primitive beliefs about the purity of struggle and the strength of our team. The home team. Of the right and the white. Surely Bernard Malamud knew it; Jack has read The Natural a score of times, always hoping for a different ending (and when the movie offered him one, he hated it), always loving the fact that Roy Hobbs named his cudgel Wonderboy. And never mind the critics with all their stuffy talk about the Arthurian legend and phallic symbols; sometimes a cigar is just a smoke and sometimes a bat is just a bat. A big stick. Something to hit home runs with.

“Holy wow,” Dale says, glancing over. And he looks younger. Boyish. Eyes wide. So Jack isn’t the only one, it seems. “Whose bat?”

Jack lifts it carefully from the box. Written up the barrel in black Magic Marker is this message:

To Tyler Marshall    Keep Slugging! Your pal, Richie Sexson

“Richie Sexson,” Jack says. “Who’s Richie Sexson?”

“Big slugger for the Brewers,” Dale says.